I am sure there are alot of you who are frustrated Skype users since the service has been done over 24 hours. To be fair, the company has done a great job leading the marketplace with user signup and an incredible job with uptime of its network. Yes, this has been a pretty huge outage which is not fixed yet, but they were up for the last four years with very few problems. As an investor in Sipphone, creators of Gizmo Project, I have always believed that our opportunity was to create a next generation carrier for VOIP and IM traffic leveraging open standards like SIP and Jabber to allow any device (mobile, Palm Treo, computer, etc.) or web application to easily integrate our service. To that end, we have put alot more emphasis over the last 18 months on the mobile opportunity as you can see from our client that works with Nokia devices and Palm Treos. I assure you that we will have more to come in the next couple weeks with respect to our mobile strategy and expansion of our device support. Despite the fact that our emphasis has not been on the desktop, Om Malik points out that Skype's problems, have been Sipphone's gains:

The company saw a 400% increase in traffic this morning, with 4 times increase in sales, calls and downloads of its Gizmo Project software. “It is interesting to see that voice callers are transitory,” Michael Robertson, founder, SIPphone wrote in an email.

So if you are still a frustrated Skype user, give Gizmo Project a try on your desktop or mobile device where you can not only communicate with any SIP or Jabber user but also do metaIM with AOL, Yahoo, Gooogle, and MSN users as well.

Perhaps Skype has become overcrowded. Its free talk connectivity is already unreliable. I’ve been frustrated with Skype because it cuts PC talk every three minutes. I cannot use Yahoo Messenger either for it is too weak to receive voice data.

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Ed Sim is founder of BOLDstart Ventures and co-founder of Dawntreader Ventures. Mr. Sim has over 18 years of venture capital experience having led seed and first round investments in a number of high profile Internet and software companies.